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Participants

Conference Organizers:

Andra Chastain is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. She is currently completing a dissertation entitled “Vehicle of Progress: The Santiago Metro, Techno-Politics, and State Formation in Chile, 1965–1989,” based on research in Chile and France, which has been supported by the Social Science Research Council. Her research interests include urban political history, history of science and technology, and the transnational Cold War. Her work has been published in the Revista de Historia Iberoamericana, Al Jazeera, and Mobility in History: Yearbook of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic, and Mobility. Before coming to Yale, she earned a BA from Reed College and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Timothy Lorek is a PhD Candidate in Yale’s Department of History. His dissertation, “Developing Paradise: Agricultural Science in Colombia’s Cauca Valley, 1927-1967,” examines a long history of agronomy in a region that would emerge as an important node in the international circulation of agricultural modernization and the so-called Green Revolution. He has conducted archival research for this project in Cali, Palmira, and Bogotá, Colombia, and consulted institutional records and personal papers in Puerto Rico, Florida, New Mexico, the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD, and the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, NY. He is active in Yale’s Latin American Studies and Environmental History communities and coordinates Yale’s program in Agrarian Studies. He has a MA from the University of New Mexico and a BA from Ohio University.

Keynote Panel:

Gilbert Joseph is the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of modern Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America, on revolutionary and social movements, and U.S.-Latin American relations. He is the author of Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924 (Cambridge University Press, 1982; rev. ed., Duke University Press, 1988; Fondo de CulturaEconómica, 1992); Rediscovering the Past at Mexico’s Periphery (University of Alabama Press, 1986); (with Allen Wells) Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876-1915 (Stanford University Press, 1996; Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2011); and (with JürgenBuchenau) Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Duke, 2013; named a History Book Club selection). He is working on a new project,Transnational Lives in the American Century, which draws upon fieldwork in Peru, Mexico, Central America, and the United States. The author of numerous articles on modern Mexico, the Mexican revolution, social movements, and the history of rural crime and protest, he is also the editor of thirteen books, including (with Daniel Nugent) Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Duke, 1994; Ediciones Era, 2002); Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Duke, 1998); Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Duke, 2001); Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times (Duke 2001); Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History (Duke, 2001); The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke, 2002); In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Duke, 2008); A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Duke, 2010); and Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenge of Modernity in Yucatán (Alabama, 2010). During 2015-16, he served as President of the Latin American Studies Association, the world’s largest association for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America (over seven thousand members worldwide).

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Affiliated Associate Professor of Law, and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research brings together history, technology, and politics, especially in Latin American contexts. Her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile received the Edelstein Prize in the History of Technology, the Computer History Museum Prize in the History of Computing, and Honorable Mention in the Recent History and Memory Book Prize Competition of the Latin American Studies Association. Her co-edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America received the Amsterdamska Award from the European Society for the Study of Science and Technology. Medina received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology. She also holds Master in Studies of Law from Yale Law School and a degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book on the historyof science and technology in the documentation of human rights crimes.

Mark Carey is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean at the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. His work links environmental history and the history of science through studies of climate change, glacier-society interactions, water resource management, natural disasters, mountaineering, and public health—particularly in the Peruvian Andes. His books include The High-Mountain Cryosphere: Environmental Changes and Human Risks, edited with Christian Huggel, John Clague, and Andreas Kääb (Cambridge, 2015); Glaciares, cambio climático y desastres naturales: Ciencia y sociedad en el Perú (Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2014); and In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford, 2010), which won the Elinor Melville Award for the best book on Latin American environmental history from the Conference on Latin American History. His current work on the history of glaciology is funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant. He is a co-founder and co-director of the Transdisciplinary Andean Research Network (TARN), and he runs the Glacier Lab for the Study of Ice and Society at the University of Oregon.

Panel 1: Genealogies of Environmental Science

Camilo Quintero completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently an associate professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá where his research focuses on the role of science and environment in the history of U.S.-Latin America relations, with special emphasis on Colombia. Some of his most important publications include: “Trading in Birds: National Pride, Imperial Power, and the Place of Nature in U.S.-Colombia Relations” (Isis, 2011) and Birds of Empire, Birds of Nation: A History of Science, Economy and Conservation in United States-Colombia Relations (Ediciones Uniandes,2012).

Emily Wakild is Associate Professor of History at Boise State University in Idaho where she researches and teaches Latin American and Environmental History. She earned her B.A. from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon in 1999 and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Arizona in 2007. Prior to graduate school, she spent three years teaching middle school through the Teach for America program in deep South Texas. Wakild’s first book, Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks (University of Arizona Press, 2011), received awards from the Conference of Latin American History, the Forest History Society, and the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. Her current projects include a primer on teaching environmental history (with Michelle K. Berry) which is under contract with Duke University Press and a monograph about national parks in South America. Funded by a National Science Foundation Scholars Award and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, this book strives to account for the ways transnational conservation and scientific research have shaped the social and ecological regions of Amazoniaand Patagonia.

María Alejandra Pérez is Assistant Professor in the Geography Program at West Virginia University’s Department of Geology and Geography. A cultural anthropologist by training, her research documents and assesses the historical and present role of field science activity, such as speleology (cave science and exploration), in the shaping of regional and national geographies and identities, with a focus on the Americas. On this topic, she is pursuing two projects. The first, Studies of Karst Environments: A Case Study of International Scientific Collaborations and Network Building, examines the history and present activity of collaborations and networking between US and Cuban speleologists. This three-year research project is funded by the National Science Foundation. The second project, Exploring Appalachia Underground: Territoriality, Cavers, and Speleology in the Mountain State, examines the vertical geographies of science and exploration of the region. Her publications include “Lines underground: Exploring and Mapping Venezuela’s Cave Environment,” published in the journal Cartographica in 2013, “Exploring the Vertical: Science and Sociality in the Field among Cavers in Venezuela” in the journal Social and Cultural Geography in 2015, “Yearnings for Guácharo Cave: Affect, Absence, and Science in Venezuelan Speleology,” published in Cultural Geographies in 2016, “Conferencing Cuba’s Geographies of Speleology: The Politics of Inclusion and Hospitality among Cave Explorers and Scientists,” upcoming in Human Geography, and the chapter “Bunker and Cave Counterpoint: Exploring Underground Cold War Landscapes in Greenbrier County, West Virginia” in the book Approaching the Ruins: Atmospheres, Bodies and Materiality in Cold War Bunkers, edited by Luke Bennett (under contract with Rowman and Littlefields International Limited). Pérez is currently working on a book manuscript which explores the at times entangled histories of Cuban and Venezuelan speleology. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia—wonderful cave country—with her husband Erik and three daughters, Andrea, Bianca, and Carmen.

Javiera Barandiarán is Assistant Professor in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores the intersection between science, environment, and development in Latin America. Barandiarán received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Environmental Science Policy and Management department, and completed aMasters in Public Policy also at Berkeley.

Paul Sabin (Discussant) teaches United States environmental history, energy politics, and political, legal, and economic history. He coordinates the Yale Environmental History working group, and serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale’s undergraduate Environmental Studies major. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (2013), which draws on an iconic story about population and resources to examine the clash between environmentalists and their critics since the late 1960s. His first book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940 (2005), explores how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation. Sabin’s current research examines the evolution and impact of modern environmental law and regulation in the United States. He also has written on international resource frontiers, U.S.overseas expansion, and energy and legal history.

Panel 2: Bodies and Organisms as Circulating Technologies

Thomas Rath received his PhD from Columbia in 2009, and is Lecturer in Latin American History at University College London (UCL). His research focuses on state and nation building in modern Mexico, with forays into related themes. He is the author of Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960 (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2013). This book used the history of military reform to explore national and regional politics, violence, and debates about citizenship and history. He is currently writing a monograph about a massive outbreak of animal disease in Mexico in the early Cold War, and how it transformed the state’s relationship with the countryside, science, and the internationalcontext.

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. Her current research interests are scientific knowledge production and circulation in Latin America and India, medical professionals and social movements, and science and development projects in the twentieth century. Her first book Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill won the Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2001 from UC, San Diego and has held postdoctoral and visiting scholar positions at the medical school at UC, San Francisco in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the Department of History of Medicine and Bioethics and at the MaxPlanck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She has held numerous grants, including those from the Ford, Mellon, Fulbright, DAAD, and Gerda Henkel Foundations.

Reinaldo Funes Monzote is Director of the Geo-Historical Research Program at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation (Cuba) and professor of History at the University of Havana. He is the author of From Rainforest to Cane Field: A Cuban Environmental History since 1492 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008),Despertar del Asociacionismo científico en Cuba (CSIC, Madrid, 2004), and editor of Naturaleza en declive: Miradas a la historia ambiental de América Latina y el Caribe (Valencia, 2008). His research is dedicated mainly to Cuban and Caribbean Environmental History. He is currently working on topics such as the comparative history of sugar cane and livestock in Cuba, a synthesis of the environmental history of the Great Caribbean region, and the animal protein question (production and consumption) in Cuba since the Hot Spring Conference. He is currently a visiting professor at Yale University (2015-2017), Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS), the Whitney and Betty Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Rebecca Tally is an Assistant Professor at LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York. She earned a PhD in History from Cornell University in 2012. Dr. Tally also holds a Master´s Degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University. She is an historian of Latin America, with research interests in Colombian history, agricultural production, economic development, and the state. She is currently working on a manuscript titled “The Politics of Wheat,” examining economic nationalism and agricultural self-sufficiency in Colombia in the 1950s. Dr. Tally has received various grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Walter LaFeber Research Fund Travel Grant, and a Tinker Foundation Travel Grant. Before joining the faculty of LaGuardia, she spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York and one year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Historical Studies at The Ohio State University.

James C. Scott (Discussant) is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. Select publications include Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1997; “Geographies of Trust: Geographies of Hierarchy,” in Democracy and Trust, 1998; “State Simplifications and PracticalKnowledge,” in People’s Economy, People’s Ecology, 1998; and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 2009.

Panel 3: Rural Development and Community Mobilization

Mary Roldán is the Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History and Chair of the History Department at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) and a member of the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and specializes in 20th century Colombian political and social history. She is the author of Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953 (Duke, 2002), winner of the Fundación Alejandro Angel Escobar Social Sciences Prize (2003). She has written about drug trafficking, paramilitarism, and grassroots peace initiatives to armed conflict. She is currently at work on two projects, a monograph analyzing the relationship between radio, public opinion and politics in Colombia tentatively titled, Broadcast Nation: Radio, Politics, and Culture in Colombia, 1930-1962 and a history of Catholic transnational activism and economic development in Colombia before and after Vatican II with a specific emphasis on Radio Sutatenza and ACPO, a mass media-based rural development and education network active in Colombia and Latin America between 1947 and 1990. Recent publications include, “Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO), ‘Responsible Procreation’, and the Roots of Social Activism in Colombia” (LARR, v.49 2014) and “Popular Cultural Action, Catholic Transnationalism and Development in Colombia before Vatican II,” in Local Church, Global Church. Catholic Transnationalism before Vatican II, edited by Stephen J.C. Andes and Julia C. Young (CatholicUniversity of America Press, 2016).

Mark Healey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. The author of The Ruins of the New Argentina (Duke, 2011), he is currently working on two new projects. The first is an environmental and political history of water in Argentina, with funding from the ACLS, Fulbright, and the UConn Humanities Institute. The second is a transnational politics ofhousing and development in Cold War Latin America, from which his paper is drawn.

Javier Puente currently serves as Assistant Professor of History in the Instituto de Historia at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University (2014), held a postdoctoral position in the Program of Latin American Studies at Lehigh University, and is currently finishing a book manuscript titled The Nature of Conflict:Rural Struggles and the Ecology of Nation-State in a Campesino Village, 1900-1990.

Diana Schwartz

Marcela Echeverri (Discussant) is an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of History. An interdisciplinary scholar with a background in anthropology and political theory, she received her PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from New York University (NYU) in 2008, and taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) before joining Yale in 2013. She has written about anthropology, gender, and nationalism in mid-twentieth century Colombia; slavery and the law in the Spanish empire; and the history of Indian and black royalists in Latin America’s independence wars. Her research and teaching interests focus on the relationship between political subjectivities and social transformation in Latin America from colonial times to the present. She is the author of Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825 (Cambridge U.P., 2016).

Panel 4: Design, Material Culture, and Cold War Imaginaries

Manuel Rodríguez is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus. He obtained his doctorate from Temple University in Philadelphia. He specializes in the contemporary history of the United States and Puerto Rico, international relations, the Cold War, and the history of warfare. He is the author of A New Deal for the Tropics: Puerto Rico during the Depression Era, 1932-1935. He is currently working with professor Silvia Alvarez Curbelo on a manuscript titled Tiempos de incertidumbre: la GuerraFría desde Puerto Rico y el Caribe (Forthcoming Fall 2016).

Fernando Purcell is Associate Professor at the Instituto de Historia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in 2004 where he started doing research on transnational and global history. He was Vice-Chair and later Head of the History Department at his University between 2006 and 2015. He serves as part of the Board of Editors in several journals. His most recent books include Ampliando miradas. Chile y su historia en un tiempo global (Ril-IHI UC, 2009) and ¡De película! Hollywood y su impacto en Chile, 1910-1950 (Taurus, 2012). In the past five years he has been doingresearch on the Cold War in Latin America, studying aspects related to community development, politics and culture between 1945 and 1970.

Hugo Palmarola is a designer who graduated from the Catholic University of Chile in 2004. He also holds an MA in Theory and History of Design from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His 2014 Chile Pavilion, titled Monolith Controversies, co–curated with Pedro Alonso, was awarded a Silver Lion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Together, Hugo and Pedro have curated exhibitions at the Architectural Association, the Pratt Institute, and Princeton University. They are the authors of the books Panel (Architectural Association, 2014) and Monolith Controversies (Hatje Cantz, 2014), which was awarded a DAM Architectural Book Award from the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and Frankfurt Book Fair. Palmarola has published book chapters with Museo Reina Sofía, Routledge, MIT Press, Sternberg Press, and Dom Publishers. He has been an International Scholar at The Society for the History of Technology and a member of the Advisory Committee for Exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the USA. He currently lectures at the Catholic University ofChile’s School of Design.

Joanna Radin (Discussant) is Assistant Professor in the Section for the History of Medicine at Yale, where she also teaches as part of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. At Yale, she also has courtesy appointments in the Departments of History and Anthropology. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, forthcoming in 2017 with University of Chicago Press and a co-editor of Cryopolitics: Freezing Life in a Melting World, forthcoming, also in 2017, with MIT University Press. She has written extensively onthe history and ethics of emerging life science and technology.

Panel 5: Traveling Experts: State and Non-State Actors

Ricardo D. Salvatore is Professor of History at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is author of: Wandering Paysanos. State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era (Duke University Press, 2003); Imágenes de un imperio. Estados Unidos y las formas de representación de AméricaLatina (Sudamericana, 2006); and Subalternidad, Derechos y Justicia Penal (Gedisa, 2010). He has coedited a number of books, among them The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America (University of Texas Press 1996); Close Encounters of Empire (Duke University Press, 1998); Crime and Punishment in Latin America (Duke University Press 2001); Culturas Imperiales: (Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2005); Los Lugares del Saber (Beatriz Viterbo, 2006); Living Standards in Latin American History (Harvard University Press, 2010); El delito y el orden en perspectiva histórica (Prohistoria 2013); and Murder and Violence in Modern Latin America (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). His most recent book, Disciplinary Conquest (Duke University 2016) deals with the works of US scholars in South America during the first half of the twentieth-century. He is currently working on a collection of essays dealing with representations, expert knowledge, and U.S. hegemony in Latin America, tentatively titled Imperial Mechanics: Essays on the Political Culture of U.S. Pan-Americanism.

Margarita Fajardo is an assistant professor of Latin American history and Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She studied History and Economics at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and obtained her MA and PhD in History at Princeton University in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She is the co-author of the article “Between Capitalism and Democracy: A Study in the Political Economy of Ideas in Latin America” published in the Latin American Research Review, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled The World that Latin America Created: Knowledge and Power in the Development Era.

Tore Olsson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches and researches U.S. and Latin American rural/agricultural history. His first book, Agrarian Crossings: Remaking the U.S. and Mexican Countryside in the Twentieth Century, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2017. During 2016, he is a faculty fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Scott Crago received his PhD in history from the University of New Mexico in May, 2015. Crago’s dissertation research engaged with analyses of ethnicity and state formation to examine Chile’s indigenous policies under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), taking as a focus a pilot project for Mapuche integration known as Plan Perquenco. This work was based on sixteen-months of research in municipal and national archives in Santiago and Temuco, Chile, as well as collaborative ethnographic research with indigenous Mapuche communities. As evidenced by an article under review at the Journal of Latin American Studies, this research identifies who comprised the dictatorship at the most local level, and how the different political dispositions of local officials affected the ways in which Mapuche interacted with Plan Perquenco. Crago specifically analyzes how Mapuche musicians exploited bureaucratic fragmentation to write music that challenged popular stereotypes of drunk, lazy and inefficient Mapuche farmers who threatened southern Chile’s economic security. Crago currently resides in his home state of New Mexico where he works as a Senior Archivist at the State Archives of New Mexico. As an archivist, he is involved in a number of public history projects. Crago’s principal public history project is his organization of a special issue through the New Mexico Historical Review that will focus on social movements in 1960s New Mexico and which compliments the 2016 Archives Month celebration in New Mexico.

Paulo Drinot (Discussant) is senior lecturer in Latin American History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London and co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies. He holds an undergraduate degree in economic history from LSE, an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford, and a DPhil in Modern History from Oxford. He is the author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State (Duke University Press, 2011), published in translation as La seducción de la clase obrera: Trabajadores, raza y la formación del Estado peruano (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2016), editor of Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America (Duke University Press, 2010), and Peru in Theory (Palgrave, 2014) and co-editor (with Leo Garofalo) of Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005) and (with Alan Knight) of The Great Depression in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), also published in Spanish translation by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. His forthcoming publications include an edited volume on Peru’s Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces to be published by University of Texas Press and an edited volume on comics and collective memory in Latin America to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press.